FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Graham Caps the GOP’s Aspirations. He Trades Our Power For His Personnel Adulation.

If there were any part of the current Congressional Leadership’s agenda about to die a well-deserved death, it would be Senator Boxer and Senator Kerry’s asinine Cap and Trade Bill. This bill seeks to drive up energy prices and make business creation harder in the teeth of a brutal recession followed by a thus far flaccid recovery. On top of the economic reasons to avoid this course of action like you would a room full of transvestites with Swine Flu, the science behind this is proving increasingly ill-conceived and outright fraudulent.

Thus, it should shock no one that Senator Lindsay Graham has stepped off the GOP short bus and seeks to revitalize this maundering cadaver of a stupid legislative idea.
It seems Senator Graham has decided to strike a compromise with Senator Kerry. He believes he can find the perfect formula to pass this bill. Marc Morano offers us insight into the level of delusional me-too-ism at work in Lindsay Graham’s low-wattage brain pan.

Graham is now touting his view that man-made global warming fears are real and can be “solved” by passing Congressional cap-and-trade legislation. Graham teamed up with Sen. Kerry to write an October 11 New York Times op-ed explaining that the GOP and Democrats should “work together to address an urgent crisis facing the world.”

Graham has latched on to perhaps the silliest of all arguments and the most insulting to voters’ intelligence: that somehow passing a congressional climate bill will lead to fewer wars in the future.

Scientist Chip Knappenberger has examined the extent to which this bill will actually forestall temperature growth due to CO2 admissions restrictions. His results suggest that successfully reducing US CO2 emissions by 83% will cool the global temperature by 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. He examines three separate IPCC worming scenarios in detail below.

By the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result in a global temperature “savings” of about 0.05ºC regardless of the IPCC scenario used—this is equivalent to about 2 years’ worth of warming. By the year 2100, the emissions pathways become clearly distinguishable, and so to do the impacts of Waxman-Markey. Assuming the IPCC mid-range scenario (A1B) Waxman-Markey would result in a projected temperature rise of 2.847ºC, instead of 2.959ºC rise— a mere 0.112ºC temperature “savings.” Under the IPCC’s high-emissions scenario, instead of a projected rise of 4.414ºC, Waxman-Markey limits the rise to 4.219ºC—a “savings” of 0.195ºC. In either case, this works out to about 5 years’ worth of warming.

In another article, Mr. Knappenberger engages the question of what would happen to IPCC warming scenarios if China, Russia, India, Canada, Australia, and the Eurozone all gladly joined into Waxman-Markey and reduced all of their CO2 emissions by 83% by 2050. Again, Knappenberger’s results present a viable argument that CO2 emission restrictions are an expensive alternative that produces minimal results. Knappenberger’s world-wide results follow below.

The U.S. acting alone under Waxman-Markey (as we have seen) reduces the projected global temperature rise by the year 2100 by 0.195ºC, if the rest of the OECD90 countries come along, the reduction increases to 0.402ºC—still less than 10% of the total projected rise. Even with the help of the REF countries, we only get a reduction of 0.602ºC.

Then we examine what we get in return for putting off Global Warming for five exciting and fun-filled years. To understand this, we have to think about what needs to occur for the US to reduce CO2 emissions by 83%. This in turn, requires an understanding of what sort of things emit CO2. Human lungs, car exhaust systems, and electrical power generation systems of almost every sort imaginable come to mind without effort.

A world in which everyone emits 83% less CO2 could easily take on the dystopic hue of the scenario described in James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand. Life in this sort of a world would again be nasty, brutish and oftentimes very short. A more factual account can be obtained from reading 1776 by David McCullough.

Scottish Genius James Watt defined the definition of horsepower as the force produced by the average brewery horse over 1 minute. We perform tasks that require many times what James Watt reported as 1 Hp every day. The little motor that grinds up my coffee every morning may use more than 1 Hp. Watt’s best estimate follows below.

Watt judged that the horse could pull with a force of 180 pounds.
This resulted in a value which was rounded to an even 33,000 ft•lbf/min.

Without a further dissertation into how much horsepower is needed to get to work, perform most of your basic tasks on the computer and then microwave your lunch, suffice it to say things would be a wee-tad harder if you were only allowed to burn 1/6 as much of whatever you burned to produce this horsepower. This anticipated difficulty already has the Barbara Boxers, John F. Kerries and Lindsay Grahams of the world buying up CO2 offsets so that they don’t have to eat the consequences of the elitist energy stupidity enshrined in Cap and Trade legislation. The people predictably forgotten are the ones that pay the taxes to make all of Boxer, Kerry and Graham’s official CO2 emissions possible.

These people feel great enough anger to spit nails. They feel profound enough outrage to chase the current ruling clique out of Washington with burning torches and pitchforks. They feel the alienation, outrage, injustice, condescension and generally snootiness of official DC so repugnant that they could do something even more revolutionary and epoch-making. They could vote in droves.

That brings us to the crux of why Lindsay Graham becomes so inimical to the general commonweal. In order to vote out the looters, voters have to have a clearly delineated, non-looting alternative. With Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid pulling all the elected levers in power right now, the GOP has a moral responsibility to be the UnObama. They owe the American people a valid alternative; a legitimate change.

Lindsay Graham’s mee-too-ism on immigration, on Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and now on Cap and Trade shirks this democratic duty and undermines the rationale for conservative voters to bother getting up in the morning on election day. This is change that only Barack Obama and his churlish, looter sycophants still genuinely believe in.

When the GOP base attempts to explain the obvious to Lindsay Graham, it just doesn’t quite permeate the smug cloud. Senator Graham has been sent by God to lead the poor, little undereducated conservative bigots by the hand towards enlightenment. It has to be a burden on the poor guy. He should seriously contemplate retirement.

Until Lindsay Graham does retire or get primaried, the Democrats frequently have a sixty-first Senator in Washington, DC. So the conservatives thinking that GOP Senator Lindsay Graham should represent their intrests are left with the following lines from the old-Hollywood Western Cool-Hand Luke.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men, you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week — which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it anymore than you men.